Life on The Farm: Halloween and Being Scared

It's November, which means it's baby month, one way or any other. This baby is coming out this month. So that's happening. 

Blogging every day is going to be too difficult, I can already tell. Days (and nights) here are turning out to be like a kind of meditation, repetitive yet mindful. On the surface, I spend my time sleeping, walking, enjoying the wildlife outside the windows, cooking and eating (a lot), reading, meeting with the midwives, making the baby’s baby book, watching movies, and just enjoying Matt’s company. I wake up every night at maybe 3 AM, really, really hot and sometimes crampy and can't go back to sleep for a few hours. So my sleeping schedule is naturally becoming 4 hour shifts. That’s really about it. So keeping a daily diary of what I’ve done would get incredibly boring.

I know a lot of my wistful Farm enthusiast friends from afar imagine me hanging out with tons of other hippy moms, gathering organic produce from a community garden, doing prenatal yoga (Kari, if you’re reading this. J )…but the reality is that you kind of keep to yourself in the quiet of the woods. Besides, I would suck at prenatal yoga right now. I so did not prepare my arms for the task of holding up my normal body plus forty pounds in over the course of about five months. There is one other mama-in-waiting here due a week before me, but she’s staying at her midwife Joanne’s cabin which is about five miles away, just off-site. Hopefully I’ll get to meet her, I’ve passed my number along via Joanne, but haven’t heard anything yet.

Yesterday was Halloween and it was pretty impossibly idyllic. It got freezing cold and windy all of a sudden, the weather was mostly crisp, and the kids around here were dang adorable in their costumes. The wind was blowing hard and leaves were flying every which way. Then we got cold and went home and settled in with some treats and Hocus Pocus on our makeshift home theater (projector, speakers, bed sheet). (Because I was worried anything worse would scare me into labor, and I've got enough anxiety to deal with right now!)

On the inside, I’m doing the same things as well. I’m imagining/wondering what this is going to be like, if I can handle it, if I’ll really be able to do it, if I’m completely crazy to come here without any real clue as to what I’m facing. I'm getting a little (sometimes a lot) more scared and then beating myself up for being scared because I know it's not helpful to be scared. I've been doing the Hypnobabies home study course, which helps me relax and release anxiety a lot, but lately it's been harder to focus on it and let it do its work. Maybe I'm just waiting for my mom to get here, I really don't want to do this without her and that scares me too.

But then on the flip side I’m feeling nervous sometimes that he’s going to be super late, since I’m 9 days from my “due date” and feeling nowhere near ready. Does that matter, I wonder? Do you have to “feel” ready for babies to come out? I’d always thought that everyone was like “I am so done being pregnant” and “Get this kid out of me!!” for the last month or so, but that’s just not me. I’d always thought it made a lot of sense to get increasingly uncomfortable as baby’s birthday drew near so that dealing with the discomfort of labor would seem like a fair trade off for it being over soon. It’s not that I don’t have a few minor discomforts, but for the most part being pregnant at almost 39 weeks is still pretty easy. So of course I have an irrational fear that he’s just never coming out. If you had an easy end of pregnancy and were surprised by labor coming out of nowhere, please do reassure me.

I’m also loving organizing things, looking at all of his tiny blankets and sleepers and imagining using them, looking at his little bed still in the box and imagining him sleeping in it. My brain is working hard at trying to wrap my mind around this invisible squirmer who keeps me up at night very soon becoming a visible, kissable baby who will have a name and a personality and not much hair if you go by the heartburn theory (and who will also keep me up at night). It seems so surreal. I know my stretching, nudging bulge so well, I still have no idea who my baby in my arms will be. I have my intuition and my feelings (extroverted, a lot like me, sensitive, high energy), but no evidence.

And that’s pretty much what every day here looks like. So when I’m inspired to write something else, I will, but if you don’t hear from me you can safely assume that I am continuing to do all of the above, over and over.

Here are some pictures:

Leaves, This picture makes me think of the Spanish term for giving birth; "dar la luz" or literally, "to give light (to)"

Here is a little leaf family:

And here is a snail who we spotted crossing the road. I insisted we help him get to the other side.